Comments
More from the author
Curated and popular this week
This is the third in a sequence of posts taken from my recent report: Why Did Environmentalism Become Partisan?
Summary
Rising partisanship did not make environmentalism more popular or politically effective. Instead, it saw flat or falling overall public opinion, fewer major legislative achievements, and fluctuating executive actions.
Public Opinion...
I think right now EAs might be making a significant mistake by paying insufficient attention to the political realm. As EAs we tend to figure out what’s most impactful for us to work on and focus hard. That’s great! But there are various actions that are ‘non-delegatable’ - the extent to which an individual can do the action is limited (like voting, going to a protest, making hard money contributions to particular campaigns). It might be useful if we were all more in the habit of doing variou...
This post presents the executive summary from Giving What We Can’s impact evaluation for 2025. At the end of this post we share links to more information, including the full report and...
Recent opportunities to take action
There is already a continuum between the cognitive capacities of humans and animals. Peter Singer has pointed to cognitively disabled humals in arguing for better treatment of animals.
Do you think homo erectus would add something further? People often (arbitrarily) draw the line at species, but it seems to me that they could just as easily draw it at any clade. Growing fetuses display a similar variation between single cells and normal adults, and it seems most people don't have issues carving moral categories along arbitrary lines.
I think your example with fetuses being the variation between single cells and adults is very adequate here. So my claim would probably be something along the lines of "the fact that 8-month old fetuses exist (which usually may not be killed anymore) is a strong reason why in most countries 4-months-old fetuses have a lot of legal & societal protection. If there was nothing in between the 4 months fetus and the born baby, I don't think many countries would ban abortion of 4-months old fetuses, rather it is there because of the transition. Thus the existence of a smooth transition between non-human animals and sapiens would increase support for "lower" animals.
I agree that there is already a continuum with e.g. disabled sapiens as you name it. However I don't think that "commonsense" is aware of that. I think commonsense sees mentally disabled people as something "that could have been any of us" (or could even still happen to many of us, as some mental disabilities are not from birth). However intermediate species can not be considered disabled exceptions/"misfortunes" or something like that